


elegy for the over-medium egg

by familiar



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Adulthood, Boats and Ships, F/M, Infidelity, Lawyers, Open Relationships, Outdoor Sex, Parenthood, Trans Character, wealthy people trying to mine themselves for interior lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 00:30:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18419081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/pseuds/familiar
Summary: Shitty has always wanted to fuck Jack Zimmermann, and he's willing to go to Florida to do it.





	elegy for the over-medium egg

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tomato_greens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/gifts).



> Happy 2018 last year birthday, Tomato, you get me, I love you. One day Tomato will post Death Eater Bad Bob fic and you will all understand that she is the best at Check Please.
> 
> This fic is set in a future where Jack transitions after retirement; [I wrote some more of it here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17022648/chapters/40026618). The idea is basically just, I occasionally see fics where characters have transitioned pre-canon, but, what if the other way around? As is the basis for all good fanfic. Will I write more of this? Well, I have, and maybe I will post it.
> 
> Also, Jack/Shitty is highly underrepresented.
> 
> I promise the next OMGCP fic I do will be happy Zimbits where nothing weird happens.

Shitty abhors how much he enjoys that he is the partner all the associates try to pal around with.

One of the new ones, Mikey, sidles up to Shitty at the Keurig and says, “So, Florida, huh?”

“Yep.” Shitty is just trying to get to the end of the day; unfortunately, it’s ten to noon. He ought to make some notes, because he has lunch with another partner, and after that, he has to dictate a letter to Tyler, his assistant. Boring stuff, really. He just wants to make it out of here by 4—perks of being at the top, and all that. He hopes if he says nothing, he’ll get off easy.

But Mikey, like every new kid, is hungry, scarred from years of begging for scraps, probably bone-tired and trying not to seem it. “What brings you down there?”

“Seeing a friend,” Shitty says. “Some friends.”

“Jack Zimmermann?”

This Keurig couldn’t be any slower. They really need a new Keurig in the kitchen. Maybe if they fired a few associates, they could buy a few new Keurigs, which would solve the little productivity deficit caused by waits to use the Keurig in the eighth-floor kitchen.

“Yeah,” Shitty confirms, because he’s got no reason to lie; his friendship with Jack is common knowledge. “And her husband, obviously. They’re gonna host me. Should be a nice weekend.” Finally, he’s able to free his mug, and scoot over so Mikey can get in.

“Larissa going too?”

“Nope.” Shitty reaches into the fridge for the two-percent. “Staying with the kid.”

“How’s she?”

Shitty’s unclear on whether Mikey means Lardo, or their child, and so he just confirms, “Yeah, she’s been good.”

“Nice.” Mikey pauses, and Shitty waits for it. “I don’t mean to pry.” Yes, here it is. “But, I grew up watching the Falcs dominate.”

“Yeah.”

“And, you played with Zimmermann, right? In college?”

“Yup.”

“What was _that_ like?”

Shitty wasn’t this eager at 26, was he? “A lot of fun.”

“I played.”

“In college?”

“No, high school.”

“Ah.” He takes a sip of the coffee. Mikey looks like he has a question he’s about to burst forth with. Whatever it is, Shitty doesn’t want to answer it. “Back to the grind.”

“Yeah,” Mikey says, stupidly, as Shitty brushes past him.

He really needs to stop making himself so accessible.

* * *

Neither of them knows how to cook, and it’s badly obvious. The kid has started asking questions: how come you don’t make fish like Jasmine’s dad? How come we never have anything new? They have chicken legs three times a week. They’re having chicken legs tonight.

“If you wanted a change of pace,” Lardo says, “you could go with your dad to Florida.”

“No thanks,” B says. “I’ll pass. Gross.”

“You used to like Florida,” says Shitty.

“They have the beach.”

“We have the beach here,” their child whines.

“Sure,” Shitty agrees, “but, kiddo, it’s March.”

“You can go to the beach when it’s cold.”

“She’s got a point, Shits.”

“No one’s forcing you to go. I’ll get the whole pool to myself. I’ll get pie every day. You know what your Uncle Bitty’s gonna make me?”

“What?”

“Boston cream pie.”

“Dad,” she says, “that’s a cake.”

“Fair enough,” he agrees. Jeez, he’s sick of chicken.

“You’re gonna bring a pie home anyway.”

“Yeah? What kind, do you think?”

“Probably just apple,” B guesses. “Because it travels easy.”

“Lards?”

She thinks for a moment. “What’s in season in Florida right now? Like, what, rhubarb?”

“I don’t know about plain rhubarb pie.”

“Maybe kumquats,” says Shitty. “Honestly, no idea.”

“What’s a kumquat?”

“A little orange thing.”

“It’s a fruit, B,” Lardo tells her.

“It’s a little citrussy thing. That’s it, isn’t it? Candied kumquat. Kumquat cream pie.”

“Maybe just a shoofly,” Lardo muses.

“What’s shoofly?”

Shitty grins at his daughter. “A kind of pie.” He hopes he hasn’t let on that he doesn’t exactly know _what_ kind, exactly. Gooey, he thinks. Maybe.

“All this pie talk is so boring.”

“What do you think, Shits? Soggy bottom?”

“Depends if Jack is putting out of not.”

Lardo, of course, laughs.

“I don’t get it,” says B.

“If Jack isn’t putting out it’ll be one of every kind of pie, frankly.”

“Or maybe just some abomination that’s every pie combined in one.”

“I’m so confused! What about Aunt Jack?”

It warms Shitty’s heart how she pronounces it like a good Bostonian: _Awnt_ Jack. Very proper. Lardo’s family says it wrong, like the insect. It’s all that time around the purebloods at Milton, Shitty thinks. He’ll have himself a proper Cantab after all. He always thought he’d hate that, but it sort of warms his heart that she bitches about chicken dinners and gets snotty about pies. At the same time he’s certain it would warm his heart anyway if she didn’t. Anything she does is warm to him.

“Jack appreciates a good pie,” Lardo explains.

“Well, who doesn’t?” B throws her hands into the air. “I don’t even know what you guys are talking about.”

“That’s why we’re talking about it,” says Shitty. “Come on, my flight’s at 8. Let’s pick up the pace.”

“There’s pudding cups for desert if you eat your salad.” It’s a caesar kit and it comes in a bag. They eat it every night. Sometimes in the summer they switch it out for a coleslaw one.

“Can I have whipped cream?”

“I dunno,” says Shitty. “Lards?”

“Sure,” she says. “But finish both chicken legs, and also the salad.”

B looks disgruntled, but she does it anyway. Shitty’s the one who can talk a CFO out of the courtroom and into mediation, but Lardo gets B to eat her salad.

And, well, Lardo does other things, obviously. But he melts when he sees how B performs eating her caesar with gusto in Lardo’s general direction. He’s the useless one here, and he knows it.

He’s never been prouder of anything in his life.

* * *

Lardo’s in her natural state: naked, her face freshly scrubbed. Her hands in his hair, sitting over him. “It’s not your job to fix their problems.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘problems,’ ” says Shitty. “I would say, like, typical marital disagreements that can probably and will probably be worked out.”

“By having sex with you?”

“Well, they’re sexy problems.”

“Sex problems, you mean? Problems aren’t sexy.”

“They can be,” Shitty says. “Like, wouldn’t you say BDSM is problematic? But I find that pretty sexy.”

Things that are pretty sexy to Shitty include: Lardo’s breasts hanging over him, out of reach, forever off-limits. Talking things out. Knowing Lardo’s been with more women than he has—which, well, it’s not hard, not exactly; it’s not as if he’s cultivated an especially lengthy roster. And, of course, Jack Zimmermann. Will her breasts be off-limits? Will she let Shitty rest his head in her thighs and breathe her in as deeply as possible? Will she stroke his hair?

Will she get cold feet?

No, of course not. This is Jack, after all. Reliable Jack, Jack who commits.

He still asks, “You think Jack will go through with it?”

“Just don’t use the phrase ‘pussy out,’ ” Lardo tells him.

“ ‘Pussy in’ is my objective here.”

She laughs, reaches for her wine glass, runs her fingers through his hair. “Only you would think that having sex with you would fix everyone else’s problems.”

“Worked for you, though, didn’t it?”

She swallows her wine and says, “Fair enough, Shits. Fair enough.”

* * *

Shitty rises in the dark and only notices the emergence of daylight when he’s brushing his teeth, shoulder against the bathroom doorjamb, prolonging it so he can stare at Lardo as she sleeps—which is creepy, but he can’t help it, only wishes he could. There won’t be any traffic en route to Logan, it’s a quick drive anyway, he hasn’t got a bag to check, and he packed the night before. The heat isn’t programmed to come back on until 7, when Lardo and B will be finishing up breakfast. She’ll drive B to school, because she teaches no classes on Fridays. They’ll be getting up shortly, and he’ll say goodbye to them, and leave them to have their day—their long weekend—without him.

Shitty is ever-conscious of how little he contributes. He doesn’t drive his daughter to school. He didn’t give her his name. (Well, not his last name, not in a normative way.) He’s cracked the code on how to get every last ounce of goo out of the caesar salad kit dressing packet, but he doesn’t actively contribute to meals otherwise. He can’t talk about art with her, and maybe he doesn’t want to: he wouldn’t even have wanted his own father to try to connect with him, and maybe that makes him a bad person, but there’s just something about dads, man. They’re only okay when they’re not your own.

Shitty was okay with the concept of being a dad up until he had this squirming child in his arms and all he could fixate on was that he was still sitting, soaked, in a kiddie pool of bloody lukewarm water in his own living room.

“I thought it would be worse,” Lardo said, though she hadn’t seemed to have enjoyed it, exactly, not when it was happening and certainly not after, when she reached with lithe arms across the pool to steal back their unnamed baby. Shitty had filled with immense relief; she was doing the kid a favor.

“Do you think it’s a bad thing if the first human being you ever come into contact with is a lawyer?” Shitty had asked.

His mother had laughed. Their doula had laughed. Lardo’s mother was too absorbed in snapping pictures, and mostly ignored him anway. And Bitty had knelt by the side of the pool with mini pie in a napkin, handed it to Shitty and said, “Jack had to go to an optional skate, but lemme get a picture for him?”

“You could at least let me brush my hair out,” Lardo had said.

“He was just here, Lards.”

“He left an hour ago,” Bitty explained, and so, somehow, the birth of their child had turned into a conversation about Jack Zimmermann’s whereabouts.

No one took the time to reassure Shitty about his worry specifically. Maybe they had all just assumed he wasn’t serious.

But, well, he had been.

* * *

Jack turns up alone, which is a rarity. She’s been umbilically attached to Bitty for so long that Shitty thinks, this isn’t right, what the fuck?

“Bittle’s annoyed you didn’t fly into West Palm Beach,” she explains, removing Shitty’s bag from his body, and swinging it over her shoulder. It bisects her breasts in a weird way, one flattened and the other pushed aside. It must be uncomfortable, Shitty thinks, before he forces himself to cease staring.

Shitty puts his hand behind Jack’s head and kisses her cheek. “Do you know how hard it is to get a flight from Logan to _West Palm Beach_ before ten?”

“No.”

Shitty sighs. “It’s great to see you, you know? A sight for sore eyes.”

“What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Winter in New England, I guess. Missing my bros. My amigos—what’s gender-neutral for amigos?”

“Bros is fine,” Jack says, leading him out into the sunlight.

It’s Florida, and there is quite a bit of sunlight. Shitty has sunglasses in his jacket pocket, and he puts them on, squinting up at the parking structure. “This isn’t even New England summer. This is like, radioactive-quality sun. I don’t think you’re supposed to get this much sunlight.”

“I have mineral sunblock in the car. I take it everywhere. You’ve been here before. And I suppose you get used to it.”

“You don’t have that healthy golden glow, really.”

Her cheeks become redder. “Well, I burn.”

In many senses, Jack and Florida are an uneven fit: she’s as rigid as Miami is louche, and though Shitty can tell she’s dressed up for him (that’s a first) there’s just a hint of sweat under the strap when she removes it to toss Shitty’s bag into the backseat of her truck.

And yet they’re both—otherworldly, maybe. They sit down at a café for lunch or, in Shitty’s case, brunch. A Cuban place with air conditioning, lots of it, even on the patio. Jack sits against a spray of palm fronds and fans herself with the menu before she reads it, asking for water and biting her lip. She put on lipstick, which is like—Jack has never put on lipstick, maybe ever. She ends up with some on the fronts of her veneers. (Or are they implants? Unclear, just, Jack’s original teeth were last seen on the ice in the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, many years ago.) It’s not a bad look for her, a pearly coral. (Something about orange and blue, Shitty tells himself; he lives, after all, with a woman who paints in the bedroom.)  It brings out her eyes.

“Here.” Shitty scoots forward in his seat, gesturing to his mouth. “You’ve got something.”

“Ah.” Jack looks around, as if for help—as if for someone who’s not there. “Um.”

Lardo’s done this a zillion times. Shitty’s watched her. “Here, you just kind of—” He rubs his index finger against his front teeth. “See? You look good.” Really good, Shitty thinks. “New color?”

“I dunno. Bits thought it looked nice.”

Shitty reaches over for the fat braid that falls loosely against Jack’s shoulder, against her armpit. It’s not tight like the plait Lardo would pin to her head in the studio when she still had long hair—Jack’s is sweet like something in a fairytale, a catalogue. It’s not a practical hairdo; it’s frizzy despite the air being on.

Shitty reaches over, yanks it. “This Bits’ doing, too?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t believe this is your hair.”

“it’s not my hair. I mean, it is my hair, but I didn’t grow it.”

“It’s fake?”

“No. It’s real hair, but it’s someone else’s hair.”

“Jack Zimmermann,” says Shitty. “Do you have _a weave_?”

“Shits,” she says. “What am I doing?”

“I dunno, what are you doing? I mean, I think you look good.”

“I don’t know.”

“Really good,” Shitty insists.

“Don’t pull my hair,” Jack says. “I mean, it’s not my hair, what if it falls out? He’s got me—I look like a drag queen.”

Shitty can’t deny it, so he opens his menu, asking, “What’s good here?”

“I don’t know, Bittle likes it.” She tries to turn away, but when she does a palm frond hits her in the face. She sighs. “I think it’s in my lipstick.”

They don’t do too badly between the two of them, Shitty doesn’t think: fried cassava, croquettas, black beans. Jack orders a steak, because of course she does. Shitty orders a Cuba libre, because he’s on vacation. He’s never had one before, weirdly. It turns out to be a rum and Coke with lime.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Jack says, with some gusto; there’s a bit of a “let’s rally” spirit to it. Shitty loves that because it’s so infectious. Lardo has the same attitude, most days: a yes-we-can, oh-no-you-don’t pluck that Shitty has always lacked. He tries to mask this serious deficit with showmanship, which is what makes him a decent lawyer, but he’s also a realist—which, actually, is also part of why he’s a decent lawyer. He’s very “let’s look at the facts here” about things. He drinks the rest of his rum and Coke; it’s weak, more cane sugar than alcohol.

When Jack gets her steak, she says, “I shouldn’t eat this,” but does anyway.

“Why not?”

Jack nods at the Coke. “Well, I’m not on vacation.” She digs in anyhow, and explains through a full mouth, “I’d make a pretty steep wager that Bittle’s making something excessive for dinner.”

“We were wondering,” Shitty says, meaning all three of them, the full component. “He promised me a Boston cream pie.”

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “I try to stay out of it. It’s just better if I stay out of it.”

“Why?” Shitty presses. Jack has this way of looking everywhere but straight into a person’s eyes. She spoons black beans onto her steak and sops up oil from the cassavas with hunks of cheap bread and pretty much plows through the meal like it’s circuit training: bread, steak, beans, gulp of water, then bread again and so on, moving kind of clockwise around her side of the table. Everything’s moved to her side of the table, Shitty’s noticed. He sips his drink; it’s become watery as the ice has melted under the splotches of sun that get through the canopy of palms overhead.

Finally, Jack deigns to say, “I think it’s the estrogen.”

“What is?”

Midway through her meal, she rests the fork and steak knife properly, crossed over the dish. She swallows, takes a gulp of water, leaves the last of her coral shimmer on the highball. “I like everything he makes.”

“He’s good,” Shitty agrees, not sure what she means.  “What’s estrogen got to do with it?”

“It’s the same conversation over and over again, Shits. What can I make you? What do you want for dinner? I like food. I like eating. Make me whatever you want. I’ll eat it.”

“It’s, um, estrogen makes you not care what you eat?”

She shakes her head. “Estrogen makes you fat,” she says, “and hungry. I never cared what I ate, I mean, other than hitting my macros.”

“You’re not fat,” Shitty says, slowly, though she certainly isn’t skinny, exactly. The word _thick_ comes to mind for some reason.

“You need to be a little fat to maintain a shape.” She motions with her hands.

“Do you and Bits, like, talk about this?”

“I really try not to.” She looks around like she’s worried he might be standing right behind her. She then shrugs at Shitty, a kind of ‘what can you do?’ and she picks up her knife and fork again, getting back to work.

“I don’t know what to say.” Shitty knows what he _wants_ to say, but he’s not sure it’s called for. Instead, he picks up his phone. “I’m gonna let the fam know I’m here,” he says. “Put your fork down for a sec.”

“Don’t take a picture of me.”

“Why not?”

“Let me take a picture of you.”

“They see me all the time. That’s not exciting.”

She laughs, as much as she ever does, a brief, "Ha ha." And then, “I’m not exciting.”

“I think you’re extremely exciting.” He takes a picture of her, heavy-lidded and smiling much less widely than a publicity still. He angles it to try to flatter her, to capture the shadow that falls under her cheekbones rather than the length of her nose or the width of her jaw. When she reaches for her purse on the ground, Shitty gets an eyeful of armpit hair.

“Let me get one of you.” She digs through her purse, presumably for her phone. There’s a bit too much in there and she takes out a few things: wallet, tube of lipstick, car keys, a tablet. “I’m a better photographer anyway. I’ll send it to Bits. He’ll be so happy you’re here.” She raises the phone, looking not at Shitty, but at the screen, adding, “He won’t like that we came here without him.”

“Well,” says Shitty, “he didn’t want to come, did he?”

“You really ought to have flown into Palm Beach as instructed.” Her thumbs dart across the screen. “He’ll never forgive you.”

There’s truth to that; Bitty is not forgiving. He gets his claws into something and keeps them there forever. He’s a little book of slights, a compendium of hurt. Fair enough, Shitty figures, for someone who’s had his child body forced into an enclosed space. It just happens to be an uncanny ability of Bitty’s to simultaneously move past and stay rooted.

“I’m here, with this beaut, having Cuban,” Shitty writes, and he attaches the picture of Jack to the message.

“Tell her she looks pretty,” B replies, in an instant. Shitty will not, but he appreciates the support. “Nice hair.”

“You should be in class,” Shitty tells his daughter.

Lardo sends emojis, a heart and a duck. And then: “But yeah, B, school?”

“It’s a break,” B says.

“Miss you guys,” Shitty tells them, before putting his phone away.

* * *

Shitty isn’t here to see the sights; he’s here to stay with Jack and Bitty for the weekend, and so he puts aside his inclinations toward art deco and neon and goes back to Palm Beach with Jack. He hates their house, because it’s large and it’s tacky, or it’s tacky because it’s large. A person could be sitting in the same room as another person, and those people might have to shout to even hear one another. In Shitty and Lardo’s vintage two-bedroom they can’t even fuck (whatever passes for fucking between them) without whispering for fear of getting caught. Shitty wouldn’t mind; it might be awkward, but kids have to learn sometime.

Lardo, though: “No one needs to hear their parents do that, Shits.”

You promise your children that you’ll feed them and love them and put them through college. You can’t promise they’ll never hear you bang, though.

Bitty calls Shitty a “sight for sore eyes,” and Shitty says “you too, man,” and it’s only while they’re hugging tightly on the front steps that Shitty realizes, oh, I may have said that to Jack. It can be hard to dig out the meaning in every last cliché. Is it something you say, something people say? It is indicative of some grander truth, some pattern in your relationship, some mutual quality of stock and experience? Then a shock goes through him: he is glad to be here, and well, and alive, and when he lets go of Bitty, Bitty is grinning, too.

It’s almost enough to make Shitty feel guilty about what he plans to do with Bitty’s wife.

Well, never mind, he tells himself, rebuffing Bitty’s offer to carry his bag. Of course Jack takes it off of him from behind, and they stand in the foyer all three performing a miniature drama about whose claim to labor is most valid: Shitty is a guest, but Jack is a woman, and Bitty is the smallest.

“I’ll just put it in your bedroom,” Jack says, because she’s holding it anyway.

Shitty reaches for her as she goes and says, “Aw, come on,” and he’d have followed if he could, but Bitty’s put his body between Jack and Shitty and firmly planted himself in Shitty’s way.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Bitty says, arms on hips and standing on his toes. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

“Well,” Shitty says, “I did.”

“I made so much.” Bitty turns and starts walking.

Shitty follows. He’s been here before; it’s the kitchen they’re headed to. “How many pies, Bits?” he asks.

“Technically it’s a cake.” Bitty’s hips sway as he walks.

 “I knew it, Bits.” Shitty’s so relieved. “I fucking knew it.”

* * *

When he texts a picture of the Boston cream pie that night, he writes along with it, “I fucking knew it.”

Lardo writes back, “Nice.”

And B says, “We’re having tubes of cookie dough.”

In front of him sits a glorious cake, eight-layered and naked and dripping in ganache, and topped with orchids. It smells like the inside of a bakeshop and sits atop a silver cake stand. It looks like something from a magazine. It probably tastes like something from a movie.

Shitty wishes he was eating cookie dough out of a tube anyway.

* * *

There is a kitchen table, a formal dining room, a covered verandah off the kitchen, and a little café table on the patio by the pool. Shitty suspects they’ll do it right and have dinner outside in the sultry evening; he’s disappointed when Bitty asks him to lay the tablecloth out in the kitchen. Before doing so, Shitty finally takes his shoes off. He wouldn’t have, but he notices on his way back to the buffet in the dining room where Bitty says they keep the linens that he’s leaving little bits of Back Bay sludge and municipal salt-truck dredge on the hallway’s gleaming Spanish tile. Bitty spies him trying to smudge it out of existence with his gold-toed sock and says, “Oh, shoot, don’t even worry about that, it’s tile. And we have a housekeeper,” because of course they do. “You’ll ruin your socks.”

Like Shitty cares about that. He just shrugs.

“I’m surprised Bittle’s letting you set the table,” Jack tells him when she brings over a stack of dinner plates.

“I’m not sure letting’s the right word.” He takes the plates. “But I enjoy it.” The kitchen table isn’t that big. “I appreciate the good china though.”

“This isn’t the nice china.”

“Yeah?” Each piece feels like it’s so lightweight it would snap in Shitty’s hands, if he only wanted to break a piece in half. And it really feels like it would just separate cleanly, in two neat pieces; it wouldn’t splinter into shards you’d have to sweep into a dustpan. What if he dropped this plate? Maybe Bitty would tell him to just leave it for the maid, or whatever.

“The nice china is his grandmother’s,” Jack says, and it catches Shitty off-guard for some reason. He must look it, because Jack asks, “Lost in thought there?”

“Do I do the napkins like this? That’s how Bits likes it, right?” He lays it atop the dinner plate.

“Ultimately, but you need the salad plate first. I’ll get it. And the flatware.” Jack shuffles off.

So dinner’s in the kitchen, and it’s slow, and it’s tedious. The eat a salad of bitter greens (some are maroon with white and some are yellowy with blotches of maroon; some dark green with purply veins) with blobs of citrus (“Blood orange supremes nicely,” Bitty explains) and a buttermilk-lemon dressing. It’s familiar to Shitty because he’s had it before, because Bitty makes a lot of buttermilk-based dressings, but also because they all have the same sour-salty twang that Shitty squeezes out of the caesar kit pouch. Then there’s fat, cold shrimp served on bowls of mounded ice with paper-thin lemon slices and some kind of sauce that Bitty made himself.

“They’re not local,” he says, poking a shrimp, “but who cares?”

Shitty doesn’t care, because he wouldn’t know the difference, and Jack doesn’t seem to care, either. She lets Bitty take the shells off her shrimp when it gets too messy, but sucks the remains out of the tails long after they’re discarded on the side of her plate.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Bitty chides her. “I’ve got more in the fridge.” But Jack doesn’t listen.

To pry the look of dismay off Bitty’s face, Shitty asks, “This sauce is good. What’s in it?”

“Oh, bless you for saying that”—it doesn’t sound like one of his kind-but-bitter bless-yous. It’s more … pitiful, like, “You dummy.” “It’s comeback sauce. It’s a Southern thing, but more a Gulf thing than a Georgia thing. The first time I had it was from Atlanta when my parents went to a fancy fish place for their anniversary and brought home the leftovers. I remember thinking, wow, you know, this would go nice with some fried green tomatoes. But, I Googled it, it’s just mayonnaise. Disappointing, right?”

Jack is licking it off her fingers.

“Or maybe not.” Bitty slips the final tine of his fork under the last bit of shell, then he grabs the fan of the tail, then he yanks. “It’s just mayonnaise and some sriracha.”

“Sriracha! I’m shocked.”

“Don’t be shocked,” Bitty says, “it just gives the sauce a little sweetness. There’s some other things in there—some celery salt, some paprika. There’s no recipe for it. You just kinda.” He shrugs, gesturing. “You know.”

Shitty doesn’t, because he doesn’t cook, but he says, “I know.” He isn’t surprised that there’s a third course, but he does say, “Jesus, Bits, you don’t have to cook for me like this—”

And Bitty interrupts to say, “Of course I don’t _have_ to, but I like to, because how often do I get to?” Shitty’s trying to figure out what the fuck to say to _that_ when Bitty adds, “Not often enough!” He’s serving pasta with wooden tongs: it’s very thin, angel hair in a shimmery sauce, flecks of herb, some kind of meat.

“What is that?”

Bitty doesn’t miss a beat: “Langoustine— _not_ langostino.”

“Oh, yeah, obviously.” Shitty doesn’t know the difference.

“I’m just trying to serve a nice Floridian meal here. So I figured, lots of seafood, some citrus. It’s not local, obviously—just thematic.” He passes a plate to Jack and stuffs his tongs back into the pan.

“You know, we can get seafood in Boston, Bits. You didn’t forget that about New England, right? You really didn’t have to go to the trouble.”

Bitty sniffs. “It’s _thematic_.” He hands Shitty a plate, and serves himself last.

The cake has been sitting on the table throughout the meal, as if presiding. Shitty doesn’t know why, but it feels like some kind of implicit threat.

* * *

Shitty offers to help clean up, or at least clear the table, but Bitty’s having none of it. He shoots one look at Jack, though, and she’s up scraping plates and putting the Boston cream pie under a cake dome. Bity scrubs at the sink, and Shitty watches from across the kitchen: Jack puts a hand on Bitty’s ass, leans in, says something—Shitty can’t hear it.

Bitty says, too loud, “You’re so sweet, come here,” and they peck on the lips. From a distance it’s like—the silhouettes, their backs, the fact that Shitty hasn’t seen them really occupy the same space yet—it’s like, for just a moment, he feels a ping of recognition. He also feels guilt. But, he’s got half a glass of white wine left. He swallows it down.

Jack brings him a beer, asking, “Do you want to go sit on the patio? There’s a fire pit.”

 “Yeah, that’s chill, let’s do that.”

Bitty doesn’t budge from the sink.

So Shitty walks over. “Bits, you coming?”

“Oh.” Bitty turns off the faucet and wipes his hands on a dishtowel. “Sure! Yeah, I’d love to, just, hold your horses a sec.”

“Holding em.”

Bitty holds up a finger, and dashes over to the wine cooler. He grabs himself a beer. “Okay, okay.” He does something theatrical, a little bow. “Lead the way.”

It’s cooler outside at night, but Jack’s already lit the fire. It’s a tricked-out set-up: the outdoor kitchen, the fire pit, the pool. There are heat lamps, though they’re unlit, and they’ve got that good all-weather upholstery that Shitty’s sat on at clients’ homes, or nice hotels. The house wraps around them—it’s a courtyard, basically, though one end is open save for a wrought-iron gate that’s been added since the last time Shitty came to visit. Shitty thinks, for a moment, unkindly, about rich people needing to wall things off. Then he remembers that he _is_ a rich person, and then he stands there, dumbly, telling himself that he’s not like that, he wouldn’t do that, there’s no iron between him and the rest of the neighborhood. It’s only in the past year that they’ve begun to let B wander out with friends. He also used to sneak out of his bunk at camp; at school, he didn’t exactly respect curfew every night.

“Shits,” Jack says.

Fences don’t just keep people _out_ , Shitty thinks, and he sits down.

Bitty’s got a throw blanket out from somewhere, and he wraps it around his shoulders. “You don’t have a drink!” he says, grabbing Jack’s thigh. “Sweetheart, do you want me to get you something?”

“I’m okay.” Jack crosses her legs, sits with her knees wide, skirt pooling in her lap. “You want me to twist that off for you?”

“Please.” Bitty thrusts the bottle into her hands. “Well, I wish you had a drink, because we shout toast.”

“To what?”

“Just because, Jack.” Bitty accepts the beer. “Because we don’t—because old friends.”

“Old friends is a good reason,” says Shitty, and as soon as it’s out of his mouth he feels instantly mortified. He tries to recover: “Thanks for having me, guys. Pals. It’s nice to be here.”

“Always an honor.” Bitty leans into Jack, head falling on Jack’s shoulder, gripping her thigh in one hand and clutching his beer in the other. “I can’t wait to show you the boat.”

“Oh, yeah, the boat.”

“It’s a ship, Bits.”

“Oh, you shush—she’s been doing this, this correcting me—”

“Well, why do you have to say it consciously wrong?”

“Why do you have to correct me? Boat, ship! It’s very pedantic.” Bitty lets go of Jack’s thigh, and rolls his eyes. “Women,” he says, “am I right?”

Shitty is always surprised, though he shouldn’t be, that Bitty directs this shit at him. “People in general, I find—”

“Ugh.” Bitty shakes his head, and drinks his beer.

“I’d be delighted to see your _ship_ ,” Shitty says, though again—not so much. “You like, dock it somewhere?”

“It’s in the marina,” says Bitty.

“We haven’t taken it out yet. I’d offer to take you out, but we don’t have a yachting license.”

“So many rules! God, you’d faint, so many rules to dive one darn boat around the marina. We’re not planning on sailing it to Mykonos or something—”

“Do you want to?” Jack asks.

“I did bake a pie on it.”

“Of course,” says Shitty. “Of course you did.”

“What’s the point of owning a _yacht_ if you don’t use the kitchen?”

“What _is_ the point of owning a yacht?”

On the other side of the fire pit, Jack and Bitty both go quiet.

And then Shitty feels awkward. “Well, mazel tov, that’s some sick-ass shit. A goddamn yacht! I’ll drink to that, too.”

As he does, Bitty says, “We’re going to have a little party on it. For our anniversary, you know.”

“In August,” Jack adds.

“Your anniversary is in August? I thought—”

Bitty interrupts. “ _Well_ , we got _married_ in January, over the All-Star break, that was the big compromise—you remember, that kept the press mostly out of it. But August—it was twenty-five years ago this next August Jack asked me.” Bitty pauses. “She asked me to—”

“Get married?”

“Married! I was a college junior, Shits, gosh. No, she asked me to be her—you know.” He pauses again. “To get together.” He puts his hand back onto Jack’s thigh now. “And she was so cute about it, too, I was making dinner in the kitchen, I think cassoulet? I can’t remember if I put duck in it, though—where would I have gotten that in Providence? Now I’d get it from the internet, probably—you gotta put duck in your cassoulet, Shitty, it’s rich enough but the beans soak it all up—have you had my cassoulet? You must have.”

“Maybe?”

“So I was making this cassoulet, and—” The whole story, the whole fucking story? Bitty just goes on about it: cassoulet and a mini-fig and French flashcards, like Shitty doesn’t know the story, like he doesn’t—like he doesn’t have his own story.

A guy and a gal getting together isn’t a story, Shitty thinks.

“So,” he says, when Bitty’s done talking. “Anniversary party?”

“That’s right.” Bitty puts his bottle down. “The fourth. That’s a Saturday night.”

“In Montreal?”

“Lord, no. How’d we get a whole yacht up there? Without a license? I don’t even think there’s anywhere to dock it. Down here.”

Shitty almost spits his beer out. “In August?”

“It’s our _twenty-fifth_ anniversary,” Bitty says. “And Jack is turning fifty!”

“Bittle.”

“Oh, you hush, you look great for fifty.”

Jack sighs, pats Bitty on the head, stands up. “Let’s take a walk. I want to stretch my legs.”

“Can we walk down to the shore?”

“What, the beach? We could. Sure.”

Shitty gets up, too. “Bits?”

“Hm?” He seems like he’s in some kind of fugue state.

“You coming?”

“Oh, no, you both go on—I’ll turn off the gas. I got a video to edit.”

“If you’re sure, Bits.”

Bitty grabs Jack by the hand and says, “You’re sweet,” and then he pecks her on the lips. It’s a fleeting negotiation: Jack stoops a little, Bitty pikes up, and it’s over before Shitty can linger too long on the sight of it.

“Go on,” Bitty repeats, and he swats or pats Jack’s ass like a parting gesture—hard to say which. Something in between, not quite either.

“We’ll be back,” Jack says. It’s hardly registered.

* * *

“I have to give a speech,” Shitty says. “I have to explain.”

“Of course you do.”

It’s hard to believe the ocean that’s lapping at their feet is the same ocean Shitty himself lives nearby. It’s “cold,” Jack warned him, but it doesn’t appear to bother her much if it is, and Shitty doesn’t mind, either.

“Well,” she says; it’s drawn-out, meaningless. “Bits thinks it’s cold. The water, I mean.”

“Do you come down here a lot?”

“I run on the beach.”

“Ah.”

Jack’s carrying her sandals in her hand, swinging them, sort of. Shitty wonders what she’d do if she dropped them into the surf. It’s dark, the massive homes that press up against the shore shed a varying amount of clarity, some festooned with strings of white lights across their patios and some with their pink adobe retaining walls lit up in a neighborly way and some veritable estates and compounds sealed off. Jack and Bitty’s place emits a glow that’s only dimmed a little when Bitty shuts off the firepit. There’s a light on in every window. That’s very wasteful, Shitty thinks, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s already put his foot in his mouth.

When Jack suggested they walk down to the beach, Shitty presumed they were going to make it here—right on the sand, which is something he’s never done before. He wonders if, maybe, Jack has. But there are homes upon homes, even if they’re spread out, and the water’s cold, and Shitty makes the mistake of asking, “Have you ever hooked up on the beach?”

“No,” she says immediately. “Have you?”

“God no,” Shitty says. “I’m a bed-all-the-way kind of guy.”

“I’m shocked. You seem like the type.”

“Why, because I was always taking my shirt off in college? I like to be comfortable! No need to get sand in my ass. And it’s probably worse for _her_ , jesus.” He winces. “I mean—”

“It’s fine.” Jack kicks at something in the sand—a rock, a bit of twig, a shell, or sea glass; Shitty can’t see and can only imagine. “Weren’t you making a speech?”

“Well, I wanted to.”

It’s quiet for a moment. They’ve walked far enough along the water that, looking over his shoulder, Shitty can’t make out Jack’s house without straining.

“I like your speeches. They’re familiar. Give me a speech if you’ve got one.”

“Just tell me when it hits a level of obnoxious you don’t care to engage with.”

“Mm.”

Shitty takes a deep breath. “So like. Bits has spent his life having to resist societal pressure to get over his attraction to men, and fuck women. Merely lacking an interest in that isn’t enough, you know? He’s had to overcome a lot of external forces that _I_ don’t totally get myself, but you probably do, or did, or have, or whatever, on some level?”

“Sure.” Jack pauses. “And then I do this, and I screw it all up for him.”

“Well,” Shitty says, because, sort of? But, also: “It’s kind of like, it’s his choice to be with you? He loves you so much, Jack. But love is not some metaphysical thing that visits us randomly, depriving us of our choices. It’s chance layered with emotions, layered with decisions, layered with social conditioning, layered with hormones, layered with finances, and self-perception and all that wacky other shit that fucks us up. I can’t explain it any better than anyone else ever has. But we both know it’s not as easy as everyone always being happy. Sometimes you need help.”

“I do need help,” Jack admits. “I’m okay with that, now.”

“So, I’ll help you.” He pauses. “I’m sensitive. I think I understand why Bits can’t do some things, and, fuck, listen to me, telling you I’m sensitive. But, I mean, I love the guy, I kind of pity him. He deserves to be happy? But, so do you, you know?”

They’ve slowed down—they’re just dragging their feet now.

“Tell me you know that, Jack.”

It’s just quiet.

“Jack?”

Here’s the thing: Shitty’s never really heard her cry before. And it’s not, like, sobbing; it’s a catch in her voice, a little wetness when she says, “I want to be happy _with_ him, Shits. Like it used to be.”

“Jack—”

“I want him to understand me.”

“Well, yeah—”

“I don’t want to have to cuckold him.”

“Jesus,” Shitty says. “Jesus, what a fucking word.”

Jack wipes her eyes. “Well, Shits. It’s the right word.”

They walk farther down the beach—this island ends _somewhere_ , Shitty thinks, right? But they must be moving slowly, because they never seem to near it. Jack cheers up when she mentions tickets to the Panthers game the next night—“Bittle won’t mind missing it,” like Shitty had any doubt; “they’re good seats, Shits, between the goal and the visitors’ bench” “aw, yeah, I remember”—and the water gets louder and louder until, looking behind his shoulder, Shitty can’t see Jack’s house at all, not even a sliver of it.

“Let’s go back,” Jack finally says. “I hope Bittle didn’t put the cake in the fridge yet.”

* * *

Shitty’s grandparents had a boat when he was younger, a 22-foot catamaran. Anything larger or more ostentatious could have been perceived, even (or, perhaps, especially) on the Cape, as distasteful. As a teenager Shitty has been embarrassed by his family’s old boat, but you could have piled dozens of them onto Jack and Bitty’s goddamn floating palace. It looks fake, like something from a movie, from outer space, something a much smaller ship would destroy right before the credits rolled. Shitty has empathy, he likes to think, and by the time his grandfather had died, and especially in the years since, he’s thought about that 22-foot catamaran and how it had reminded his grandfather of his sailing days, back in the Second World War. Shitty hopes B can one day look at all of his hypocrisies and faults and find it in her heart to wonder why he’d committed them, why he’d thought they were the right choice.

“Call it ‘The Right Choice,’ ” Shitty says.

Bitty’s hand lands on his shoulder. “Shitty, darling, that’s a horrible name for a boat.”

“I was thinking we could name it after the Falconers,” says Jack. “You know, something like, ‘The Falconer.’ ”

“Sweetheart, you’re not naming this boat. You’re not even allowed to name our wireless internet.”

They give him a tour; what’s weird is that the ship looks much larger, more imposing, once he’s on it—and it was nothing to sniff at before. The experience is disorienting. A morning breeze must be coming off the marina because Shitty has to hold himself in his bare arms while Bitty leads him circuitously around the decks.

“We’ll serve drinks here,” Bitty indicates, “and catering can circulate with hors d’oeuvres. I haven’t decided if I’ll make them yet, I mean, I’m not crazy, we’re talking about August. I wanna show you the bedrooms, I guess they’re staterooms, but ‘stateroom’ sounds so pretentious to me, and you know I don’t like to be too big for my britches.” What Bitty is wearing is nothing like britches, knee-length shorts that cling to his thigh muscles obscenely. It does seem as if any complicated maneuver would bust them open. Shitty’s got a finely tuned appreciation for the male physique—not a sexual appetite so much as a fondness—but Bitty was never his type, exactly.

“This is the master.” Bitty flings a door open and, well, it’s a bedroom with all the trappings—nightstands, dresser, king-size bed. It’s too big to be a queen, Shitty thinks. He and Lardo share a full-size. “Now, I hardly imagine really _sleeping_ on the boat—”

Shitty turns around to see if Jack chimes in with, “It’s a ship,” but Jack is not there.

“I mean, we’re what, half an hour from the house? Maybe if we _did_ sail it somewhere—Jack is full of ideas, you can guess, she wants to take it to Nova Scotia and Cuba and everywhere, but I told her to get a license for it first. I’m more of a Dominican boy myself but if we did take the boat anywhere I like the idea of having the good bed more than I think we’ll actually use it, you know, on the regular.” Bitty puts his hands on his hips. “It’s a damn floating hotel, is what it is.”

“It’s nice,” Shitty says, because that’s really all he _can_ say. And, besides, it _is_ nice. “Nothing wrong with a good hotel.”

“I live for a good hotel.” He leads Shitty back through the main interior of the ship, the living room and dining room or whatnot. They’re heading upstairs, back to the main deck, when Bitty turns around, sighs, and says, “I never should’ve let her sell my house in Providence.”

“You miss it?”

“Every day.” He sighs again, more dramatic. “Lord, I loved that house.”

* * *

Afterward, there’s lunch. Shitty spent his early life being shuttled in and out of clubhouse dining rooms, and there’s a peaceable uniformity to such things that he’ll always find soothing even as he despises those places, the people in them, and the social and economic rationales that birth membership-only establishments. Still, Jack is no less an old man even as a middle-aged woman, and mostly has hobbies that revolve around belonging: fishing, boating, golfing, hockey, and the occasional nice vacation. She orders a cheeseburger and it comes like every clubhouse cheeseburger Shitty’s ever known: open-faced with the cheese-topped patty on one third of the plate, the top part of the bun bottom-up adjacent, and a stack of onion, tomato, and green lettuce filling out the final third. Dijon mustard and ketchup come in little crocks. No kid wants a burger served like that. He’s seen that look on his own kid’s face: disbelief that a mere cheeseburger could have the appeal drained from it by virtue of appearing on the menu at Brae Burn, or the Samwell golf course clubhouse.

“I was thinking we could take the boat down to Boca Chita tomorrow,” Jack explains. “Panthers have the Canes tonight if you want to go. I could call the parks service for a slip. We don’t have to stay overnight. You tell me. Bittle doesn’t want to go boating. Or the Panthers game. Probably.”

Bitty is eating a crab louie salad and puts his screwdriver down to say, “I’ve got my limits, sweetheart. I’ll go to Key West anytime, but you can’t pay me to go back to Dry Tortugas, key word being _dry_.”

“Wait.” Shitty puts down the quarter of a club sandwich he’s been deconstructing, trying to pry the slice out of bread from the middle without causing too much damage. “You want to take that huge thing with six staterooms to ... where?”

“Oh _no_. You’re not taking that dang yacht anywhere without me.”

“Not the yacht, Bits, the boat. My boat.” Jack’s lips quirk into a slight, cruel smile.

“Don’t say it,” Bitty threatens, like he knows.

“The _Dicky_ ,” Jack clarifies.

“Do you see what she does to me?” Bitty puts a hand to his chest. “Chirped by my own best girl.”

“You like it, Bittle.”

“Oh, like hell I like it! I like it like I like that cursed boat. It’s a death trap, Shits.”

“I’ve been on it.”

“In which case I’m shocked you’re willing to get back on!”

“I dunno.” By now Shitty’s sandwich has fallen apart, a pile of iceberg and out-of-season tomato and bacon, husks of bread and gobs of mayo. “It’s a vacation. I have a sense of adventure.”

Bitty rolls his eyes. “No one has ever accused little old me, and I do mean old and little, of not being up for an adventure, but that boat—I shudder to think about it, and those islands—I’m thinking mosquitos, screaming children, _communal showers_ —”

“Don’t knock communal showers,” says Jack, without regard to the giant bite she’s just taken out of her burger.

“We all met in the communal showers.”

“No, I think it was at the fall pre-semester athletics cook-out on North Quad.” Bitty stabs at a hunk of shrimp with his fork. “I brought a pie, and you monsters—y’all ate it with your bare hands and I was _horrified_ , a helpless lil frog, and there I was, rewarded with my poor pie torn to shreds by a bunch of savages—in all honestly, thinking back on it, meeting in the showers might have been preferable.”

“So I was being metaphorical, like, the communal showers that forged our friendship.”

“I don’t think that was us, Bits.” Jack tilts her head toward Shitty. “I didn’t eat any pie then, and Shits would have used a fork.”

“Certain _other parties_ —”

Shitty wishes he’d ordered some kind of drink—it’s 11:30 in the morning on a Friday, but, that’s clearly not stopping some people. “I will not be held responsible for your thirty-year grudge, Bits. Sorry, pass.”

“Twenty-seven,” says Bitty, “but who’s counting?”

“You’re counting, Bittle.”

“Yes, sweetheart, my beloved, that was the joke.” He sighs. “I was so innocent! Y’all turned me into this.”

“What’s wrong with _this_?” Shitty asks.

“Nothing! Just, not innocent.” He grabs a shrimp from his salad with his bare hands this time. “I mean, look at me.” Then he pops it into his mouth.

“Yeah, bro, I’ll go to Boca Chita with you or whatever.” Shitty clasps Jack on the shoulder. “Sign me the fuck up.”

Jack’s placid expression spreads into a smile. She isn’t wearing lipstick today, Shitty realizes. “And the Panthers game?”

“I’m down for whatever, sure, that too.”

“Y’all have fun with that,” says Bitty, but he says it with a massive roll of his eyes. He then proceeds to drain his drink.

* * *

The next morning, Jack wakes up and goes for a run on the beach. Then, she goes to a class called “Pilates for Runners.” This is all before 9 in the morning. She invites Shitty, and he declines; she invites Bitty, and he just snaps, “Ha, good one” while picking dough out of the fluting of his twelve-inch tart shell. They all go to bed, and when Shitty next sees Jack she’s coming through the door off the kitchen in seven-eighths yoga pants, a high pony, and the blotchy radiance of perspiration.

“Hi,” Bitty says, when Jack goes to peck him on the lips over the griddle. “Good workout? Don’t sweat on my pancakes.”

“I won’t.” Jack does something to his ass—swipes at it, knocks into it with the back of her hand—on her way to the shower.

Shitty is beginning to wonder if she plans to have sex with him at all.

He texts Lardo, because he does not know how to leave her out of it: “Late morning. Guess 1) who went for a run and b) who’s making pancakes?”

“My guess is you are doing neither,” she writes. “We’re ordering groceries online. You want anything?”

He tries to consider it seriously, but Bitty doesn’t make it easy.

“You see,” the lecture begins, “I got the idea to make sourdough pancakes when one of my viewers asked for ideas for other things to make with a sourdough starter, you know, things that aren’t bread. And now, I explained this in the video, I don’t know if you watch my videos anymore.” Bitty noticeably pauses.

So Shitty says, “Yeah, Bits, sometimes—you know, I don’t do much in the kitchen myself.” He pauses. “They’re fun to watch. You’re a glowing presence, always.”

Bitty doesn’t miss a beat. “ _Thank you_. So I explained that a sourdough starter’s a natural fit for quick breads—your muffins, your coffeecakes—” he’s counting on this fingers “—your biscuits. Shitty, you ever had a sourdough biscuit? My mother would call it sacrilegious, but you can do it. When I do it like that I like to freeze my Crisco and then, this is for real, shave it with a vegetable peeler, so it goes into the dough in these whisper-thin leaves—”

“When do you put in the starter?”

“Oh, with the liquid,” says Bitty, like any old idiot ought to know _that_. “Then I _barely_ handle it—seems like I’m barely handling everything these days, doesn’t it?” He pauses. “Anyway you can put it in pancakes, too, and these are delicious, so, brace yourself.”

“Consider me braced,” Shitty tells him, though he honestly isn’t sure what the fuck Bitty is talking about.

“I’ll send you the link.” Bitty has it worked out so that the pancakes are finished in the oven, or maybe they’re kept warm in the oven—point is, he’s putting them in the oven, so they’ll be ready when Jack is done showering. “I got it all worked out,” he explains, over the exhaust fan. “I think it’s useful she’s got such a routine, cause it helps me time it all correctly, and then I don’t go insane.”

“When do you work out?”

“In the afternoons, usually when she’s napping.” When he flips a pancake, the sear of the skillet on its underside forces him to pause, and he stoops to the turn the heat down. He stands up and asks, “You?”

“I’ll run before work sometimes, if I can get up. Sometimes I puss out, just do it on my lunchbreak. There’s a gym in the building.”

“Mm.”

“Do you feel like you can’t work out if Jack is like, awake?”

“What? Why would you ask that? No, gosh, what, no.” Bitty squats, opens the oven, stands, lovingly and deftly slides a sourdough pancake onto the sheet of them resting in the oven, shuts the door with his knee somehow, ladles more batter onto the skillet.

“I guess what I mean is, like.” It’s now or never, Shitty thinks. He crosses his arms, leans against the kitchen island so he’s talking to the back of Bitty’s head. “I think it’s got to be really hard, right, like, living up to some ideal?”

Bitty doesn’t turn to face this, just peeks at the underside of the pancake.

Shitty continues, “You don’t have to be some picture of perfect domesticity.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It’s a cold voice—rare from Bitty, whose Georgia husk is as slow and thick and gritty as the caramel icing that shellacked the many tiers of his six-foot wedding cake. It’s typically as bright, too, that amber near-translucence glowing like the shiny butter and crystalline sugar that is the marrow of its spine.

Quickly, Bitty flips a sourdough pancake onto its back. “Shouldn’t have looked under there,” he says, dry, but maybe heating up.

That’s when Jack returns, pink from showering. Just a few footsteps before she enters the kitchen, Shitty watches as Bitty’s posture snaps up, his hand shoots to his hip, and his ass dips down to one side, as if he knew that was where Jack was going to rest her hand when she kissed him and said, “We ready to eat?”

Confounded, Shitty grasps for his phone so he can write back to Lardo: “What about toaster waffles?”

“You got it,” she tells him.

* * *

B is in fifth grade this year but in some ways, Shitty thinks, she is a very old soul. She likes to read print magazines, for example, especially the _New Yorker_ , which is monstrously expensive but she loves the cartoons. He’s not sure if she reads the articles; mostly, he imagines, she reads the little blurbs about the cultural goings-on of New York City. She recently asked them for tickets to the Rockettes, and Lardo happily obliged; they went the weekend after Thanksgiving. Shitty was not invited, and he sat at his desk that Saturday afternoon, looking down on the shoppers dragging themselves around Back Bay and thinking about why his family didn’t want him to come with and stand in a long outdoor line with them for a pricier version of hamburgers they sometimes ate at home in Cambridge. Possibly it was because Shitty had dismissed the Rockettes as “sexist garbage.”

“Maybe,” Lardo had replied, “or maybe she’s just curious.”

“Curious about sexist garbage?”

“Let’s say _you’re_ an 11-year-old girl.” Lardo paused and said, “Or let’s not say that.”

“I wasn’t saying that.”

Lardo’s brow had furrowed, all the lines of her face deepening. “You’re not the king of sexism.”

What was he supposed to say to that? “I just worry,” was all he managed.

“Yeah,” Lardo said, “you do, I know.” Then she turned her tablet back on so she could continue marking papers, and Shitty found himself fixated, on a long autumn week, with how they never truly fought: disagreements between them petered out or fell away. He wanted to compare it to a snake molting, but snakes were overall too phallic for comfort as a comparison to his own life and, more to the point, when Shitty saw animals shedding bits of themselves, it rarely looked clean. Once, at 4, he took B to the zoo and she began shrieking at the sight of an elk with slashes of bloody velvet sloughing from its antlers. Despair of his own father was something that burned bright in Shitty until he was holding his own bloody infant and realizing, oh my god, none of us ever knew what the fuck we were doing.

Lardo doesn’t second-guess anything, though, disagreements included.

Shitty lets this loose assemblage of memory and regret tumble around in his brain until he gets a text message from his daughter, a picture of a graphic in the New Yorker, not a cartoon but a little doodle nestled in two columns of text. What’s beguiling to him is the degree of abstraction: loose coils and what could be a candlestick if it didn’t morph into another coil. He stares at it on his phone trying to pick narrative sense out of the muddle until he gives up and texts her back: “What do you think it is?”

“Not anything,” she writes, “I just thought it was cool.”

“Children are inscrutable,” he writes Lardo.

“Your daughter is cutting scribbles out of the New Yorker and gluing them into her English homework,” she texts back. She sends a picture of B doing just that, paper cement drooling from bristle onto their kitchen counter.

Over the breakfast table he shows off the picture of B and her notebook and then the doodle.

“Nice,” says Jack, as she’s stirring heavy cream into her coffee from a little silver pitcher that’s dappled with condensation and must have just come out of the fridge when the coffee pot arrived on the table. Shitty notices the dairy curdle. Jack doesn’t care, drinks it anyway.

“What an industrious child,” Bitty adds, glancing up from the phone and passing it back to Shitty across the table.

Looking at him, Shitty thinks for the first time that he looks bad, or at least, his age: the bluish tinge of undereye circles, before having shaved, and Shitty notices that some of Bitty’s hair has turned ashen amidst the dirty-blond.

“Glad I wasn’t at any hockey game last night,” he says around a yawn. “Glad I don’t have to boat to goddamn nowhere.”

“Boca Chita,” Jack says. She’s staring at Bittle.

“Well,” he says, “y’all have fun mucking around. I have _stuff_ to do, now.”

“Whatcha up to?” Shitty asks, though he can imagine it’s something like: baking, editing a video, talking to his mother. Talking to his plants. Sitting by the pool and scrolling through the goss. Puttering around.

The truth is, Bitty is a good friend. He mails cupcakes to B on her birthday, has repeatedly welcomed Shitty and his family into his home, trusts them implicitly with the intimacies of his life with Jack. There are never too few seats around Bitty’s table, the cupboard too bare, his time too limited. Shitty still thinks of him as a college freshman sometimes, seeming _barely_ 18 in his shaggy hair and little shorts, cowering away from his own teammates and nervously scribbling his own coming-out across a stack of notecards. In their two years as teammates those were the only notecards Shitty ever saw him handle, though Jack swore he did learn some amount of French at _some_ point, just adequate enough to dispense with his one-semester language requirement. (There is, after all, that story—that myth—about the cassoulet.) Shitty also remembers Bitty leaning over B at the patisserie counter in some Montreal market and stage-whispering, “I dunno what these frogs are saying half the time, either, Sweetpea, just tell em what you want in good old English.” Not culturally sensitive, maybe, but Shitty saw the kindness in it; B, in her childish in-between phase, needed to hear that it was okay to speak her own language.

Bitty is buttering a slice of his own toasted caraway rye when he asks, “You want me to make you a sack of sandwiches for the trip?”

At the same time as Shitty says, “Bits, no, you don’t have to, don’t trouble yourself,” Jack says, “We’d love that, Bittle, thank you.”

“No mayo, I’m guessing.”

“We can bring a cooler.”

“Let’s play it safe. What do you like?” He turns to Shitty. “I’ve got mixed-nut butter with maple sugar. I’ve got hummus. It’s store-bought.”

“Store-bought!”

“Oh, don’t look shocked, I got _two_ houses to run.” Shitty has never asked what they do with their house in Montreal when they’re in Florida: is there a caretaker, do the neighbors look in, would it not even matter if something were to happen? Jack is rich in hockey memorabilia, if nothing else; Shitty wonders what happened to the heavy watches she used to wear, or to the thick wedding band he hasn’t seen in several years.

“And a yacht,” Jack says. She reaches over to help herself to more coffee—

—and Bitty grabs the pot out of her hands and finishes the job. “How about I’ll make you a little assortment and you both can just eat what you want?”

“You _really_ don’t have to go to the trouble,” Shitty says.

Setting the coffee pot back down, Bitty crosses his arms. “I like to,” he says, and it’s just ... tight, and cold, and Shitty really isn’t sure what he even _said_. “Just let me take care of it.”

Now Shitty doesn’t know what he wants: to back down, to double-down, to get up and leave? But Jack, eyeing Shitty’s expression from across the table, drapes a long arm around the back of Bitty’s chair, rests her elbow on the table, and begins to play with ends of her real-fake hair. “What kind of jam do you have?”

And Bitty sort of perks up, his eyes widening, and he turns to look at Jack—puts a hand on Jack’s thigh. “Some tart cherry preserves,” he says. “Blood orange and Tahitian vanilla, rose-scented lime curd—”

“How would that be on a sandwich?”

“I was gonna put it in a cake.” He moves his other hand from his lap to Jack’s lips, from which he brushes away the coffee cake crumbs—but when they’re all gone, his fingers linger. “Honestly I don’t think that experiment turned out so well.”

“Tart cherry would be good with nut butter,” Jack says.

“See, it’s winter, you can’t do any better than citrus.” He pulls his hands away and sighs. “Wish I hadn’t sent all that blackberry-yuzu home with your mother.”

“She appreciates it.” Jack gives Bitty a long, lingering stare.

Bitty rolls his eyes, but what he says is, “You’d better let me fix your hair up before you get on that boat.”

So Shitty finds himself sitting on the counter in their master bathroom, watching Bitty stand over Jack, who is on the toilet lid-down with arms crossed, as Bitty brushes out her extensions. “I bet B would look lovely with a nice French braid,” he says, pulling single sections of Jack’s hair from the crown of her head. “It’s so neat—everyone looks better all put-together-like.”

“Her hair’s not long enough.” Shitty can’t help but watch this scene with gross fascination: Jack stares up, and Bitty manages several handfuls of braid at once.

“When you’re out on the boat,” Bitty continues, “the wind’s just brutal. Everything goes flying. The last thing you want is for your hair to get in your eyes.”

Shitty’s hair has been close-cropped since he graduated college; the last time he had hair in his eyes, he would have been, what, like, twenty-two?

Bitty has graceful hands; he looks even worse in the forced dusk of their bathroom, because the one window only gets good sunlight later in the day, Shitty figures; he thinks the ocean is on the other side of the house, so the light must come through that way in the morning. One thing about the Cambridge condo is that they have the top floor and there’s light from every angle, but it’s such a manageable size that all that light converges in the living room where, if Shitty were to stand with every door open, he would see light from all directions.

“I think you look splendid,” Bitty says, securing the braid with a hair tie. It’s not loose and fantastic like that braid Jack had when she came to pick Shitty up from the airport, no, this is a tight, sturdy plait, workman like. Workwoman. Bitty presses a kiss to Jack’s cheek and says, “I’ll do sunscreen, too.”

Shitty clears his throat. “Where’d you learn to braid hair, Bits?”

After closing the medicine cabinet, Bitty says, “Watching the gals on my skating squad. And the co-ed hockey team. YouTube.” He pauses, squirting a big white glob into his palm. “Making challah.”

Looking up at Bitty, Jack says, “Thank you.” To Shitty, she says, “Your turn next, eh?”

“Worried I might burn?”

Bitty sighs. “I wish I’d never laid out in the sun.” He pulls up the collar of Jack’s shirt to work the lotion into her shoulders. “This one’s got beautiful skin, doesn’t she? I bet they weren’t lying out by the pool all summer. Or, no, I bet y’all laid out by the pool all summer but it being Montreal all summer was like, what must it have been, a week? Four days?”

“Sometimes we didn’t even have summers,” Jack says, “just winter, winter, winter, winter.”

“Four winters,” says Shitty.

Lifting the braid, Bitty rubs sunscreen into the back of Jack’s neck with the backs of his fingers. “That H-R-T makes everything real smooth, honestly. Except you could keep up with the laser, you know, that’d be nice.”

“I’ll do the face.” Jack stands and pulls the tube of sunscreen away. “Thanks, Bits.”

* * *

It’s not until they’re sitting in the boat and Jack is powering up the navigation that she says, “It’s easier not to argue him out of it.”

“Out of what?” It’s only now that they’ve parked and carried their belongings down to the _Dicky_ that Shitty realizes, ah, I’ve agreed to take a boat across open ocean. Or, is it not open ocean if one is sailing a few miles to a key? But he hears that term as clear as a bell. He has lived in Massachusetts every year of his forty-something-year life, and he feels as stupid as he felt when, as a sharp child, he asked his father if some predecessor of theirs has been, in fact, a knight.

“That would be very literal,” Shitty’s old man had said.

He could at least live up to his name and be chivalrous. “Need help?”

Jack shakes her head, comparing the satellite map to the spiral-bound book of nautical charts she probably doesn’t need to consult; Boca Chita, Shitty can see, isn’t too far off the city—the coast.

“You take this thing out a lot?” Shitty waits for Jack to look up, but she doesn’t, shaking her head again as she rubs her thumb over the shape of the island. It curls up around itself at the northeast end, a squat thing in a chain of keys hugging Biscayne Bay. Of course, they have to sail—is it sailing without a sail, without a mast?—down from Palm Beach. “Why not?” Shitty presses.

Jack looks up, bites her lip. “Wildlife protection laws are pretty restrictive,” she says. One hand falls to the steering wheel—is it called a steering wheel on a boat? “Bittle doesn’t like it.”

“Doesn’t like saving fish?”

“Doesn’t like the boat,” she says, twisting the key into the ignition. “Not that he’s been subtle about it.”

“I thought he liked boats.” Shitty feels this one purr to life, a tremble under his feet and under the swaying of the safe waters. “Remember Honey Harbor—”

Jack turns around, her long arm resting on the steering wheel. (Again, Shitty asks himself—isn’t that what cars have?) She looks up at Shitty, that long plait hanging over her lap, the smear of white zinc still evident on her cheeks. “That was different.”

“What was different?”

“A lot was different,” Jack says. “We were young. And—and a lot was. Everything was different.”

Shitty could continue to press: what was different, how were things different? They were older, out of college, playing vacation house in backwater Canada, cruising around the lake on a big old boat, throwing fish back until Jack reeled one in that Bitty decided was handsome enough to eat. The sky was a pyre, first chartreuse and then lingonberry and then midnight, colors Shitty had remembered for twenty-odd years but hadn’t been able to name until he was a father whose mornings were spent tossing crayons back into a shoebox.

“We should go before we lose the wind,” Jack says.

* * *

It’s noisy on the water, too noisy to have a proper conversation. Jack stands, mostly, and pays attention. Shitty would expect nothing less; he has long loved the way Jack’s pupils shrink when she concentrates, leaving the blue bright and clear with focus. Bitty has eyes so murky brown it’s impossible to see that he has any pupils. He gets why Bitty used to say Jack had crazy eyes, until she apparently asked him to stop.

There is only one point during the trip during which Jack says anything. The water is so green, and the air so thick with humidity, and the sky so vacant, that it’s hard for Shitty to know when, relative to the start and end of the voyage, that Jack leans over and says (practically shouts), “My father had a boat.”

“Had?”

“Sold it,” Jack says, “with the house on Massawippi.”

“Yeah?”

And Shitty gets it, like, Jack is driving, steering, piloting, guiding—whatever one does with a boat. Her intent is pure water, pure motion; there’s no room for conversation there.

It’s just one of those things they won’t talk about, one of those threads Jack spins and then cuts and it falls, practically floats, to the floor. Maybe it’s caught on the wind and it’s flung into the ocean. Maybe some fish tries to eat it and chokes and then drowns.

* * *

Sunsets take Shitty back to middle school; he can’t watch one without thinking of the figures of speech that pepper young-adult literature, of rosy-fingered dawn—which, okay, that’s a sun _rise_ —and egg yolk slithering down a glossy surface. What he never realizes is how early the sun will set, how they’ve moved ever more east. He can’t see the sun and so he’s got no idea which direction they’re facing, which side of the island they’ve docked on. The boat dips and bucks as Jack ties it or secures it or whatever the nautical terminology might be—

“What do you call that?” Shitty asks, remaining in the boat and under Jack, who’s hoisted herself onto the dock.

She looks up, her big hands gripping the rope or whatever as she wraps it around the knob. Squatting on the dock—it’s a good look for her. “What, this?”

Shitty knows nothing about boats, nothing about the ocean, nothing about trying to bind something so tightly it can’t move away from you.

“I’m tying the line,” Jack says. “This is a figure-eight knot.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s a pretty basic knot.” She is wearing big sunglasses, almost retro-looking, glamorous. Shitty’s had the same pair of aviators since he was—well, not the _same_ pair, exactly; this pair must be a few years old. But, the first pair, he must have gotten those in high school, maybe early college. He tries to imagine the earliest picture of himself wearing them: 2013, Spring C, pretty well past any legal definition of fitness.

“Is that going to keep the _Dicky_ from floating away?”

“Ha.” Jack tugs on the line. “I certainly hope so. It’s strong.” She offers a hand to Shitty. He doesn’t need the help, but lets her pull him onto the dock.

Their bags are still in the boat as they amble up to the shore—it’s tropical, pretty. Lush. Nearly empty. Not a terribly long dock; the dock bobs like the boat does, Shitty realizes.

“Okay,” Jack says, at the end of the dock, before stepping onto land. “I should check in with the ranger. If there’s one around.”

Shitty follows as she begins to scrape her way along the harbor toward the lighthouse. She looks over her shoulder as she says, “This used to be some kind of party island.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Some of the boys went after the games. If there was a ferry back before curfew.”

“You didn’t go?”

She’s slow to answer: “Maybe once.” When Shitty doesn’t answer, she adds, “We chartered a boat.”

“Not enough boats in Rhode Island?”

“It’s tough to see something right in front of you,” Jack explains. “I don’t know. That’s all.”

Classic Jack, Shitty thinks, she knows he won’t attempt to pry it out of her.

They walk around the marina; there’s a single boat docked, and it’s Jack’s. Shitty can see that more clearly as they walk around the harbor and the island unfurls toward a stubby lighthouse.

“Are there typically people here?” Shitty asks.

“I think people stopped coming when—well. I don’t know. Maybe when fuel restrictions were put in place? Lucky us, eh? No one’s around.” She rubs her chin. “Do you want to take a hike? Well, not much of a hike, it’s barely a half-mile to the other side.”

“Is there a trail?”

“Yeah, we passed the marker back there.”

The most remarkable thing about this island, Shitty thinks, following Jack dutifully up toward the sandy trail, is that the hazy Miami skyline is just visible off the coast. It recedes, though, the farther they walk from the harbor, and the further they head down the path, grown thick with trees, and bearing anemic little signs displaying the names of plants and, sometimes, distances.

It's nothing but a ten-minute walk to the end of the trail, and the other side of the island.

“Small,” Jack says, crossing her arms, and leaning against the marker at the end of the trail. “Manageable, this island.”

“Disappointed?”

“No. I like small things. Cute. Manageable. Let’s go back, finish the circuit.”

So they march right back to the head of the trail, at which point Jack raises her arms and says, “We did it.”

“What was that, twenty minutes?”

“Couldn’t be more than eighteen.”

And there’s that sun, right behind her, slipping down beyond Miami.

“Feels good,” she says. “Manageable.” Jack has never made an effort to alter her voice; if Shitty closed his eyes right now he could just as easily place these words in a stall during a breezy post-game. “Teamwork, Shits, come on.” She leads him back to the boat.

He is fully on autopilot.

“Grad that bag,” Jack instructs, pointing.

Shitty does.

Then, off the boat, back on the island, pattering down a few feet to what passes for a beach.

“Yeah, I just figured, on the sand.” Jack kicks at the sand with her bare foot. “It’s perfectly good.”

Oh, Shitty realizes. Oh. _Oh_. “You wouldn’t rather, like, on the boat?”

“Well, it.” She flattens her hand and ungulates her fingers. “You know, it’s a bit. I mean, it’s—balance would be good.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“Anything worth doing is worth thinking about, Shits.”

And Shitty is not ... he’s not so sure that he thinks that Jack believes that. Or maybe she does believe it, strictly, but he’s not so sure she follows that dictum in her own life.

But what is he supposed to do, contradict her? Now’s not the time. “Okay,” he says, and Jack begins to undress—or, at least, she takes her shirt off, and drops it to the ground. “Well, _okay_ ,” he amends, changing only his inflection. “I can work with that. Yeah. You sure there’s no one else on this island?”

“It’s a key.” Jack slips her pants down.

So Shitty follows suit and removes his, too.

Jack goes down gently, her legs falling together to one side her body. They shared a bathroom for three years in college, but she can still surprise him: Jack reaches down to wick something away.

Shitty whistles. “You get wet?”

“It isn’t that much.” Jack tugs at her bra. Lardo hasn’t worn one for ages, not since she was nursing. This one’s unsexy, a sporty thing, but it takes Jack a moment to wrest from it. Her breasts tumble out, one falling free and the other caught on the elastic band. Shitty has wondered what sex with Jack would be like—she’s always been such a quietly passionate person, more intense than wistful, her features thick with concentration on the ice and off of it. She surprises him by saying, “They’re big,” as if he hadn’t noticed that they are, relatively—to Lardo’s, anyway, or to what one might expect. Maybe Jack is, personally, still surprised by that, or maybe it’s just a way to diffuse some tension; Shitty’s cock is obviously, and unbearably, hard.

“All right by me,” he says, trying not to stare but getting total satisfaction from his purview of her body: years of hockey are visible in the discolorations and topography left by quick stitches in the midsts of games and hard collisions with the jutting bulk of giant men. There are stretch marks, too, and Shitty—well, Shitty loves women, loves the weird variety of them, how well their bodies bear their emotions, how they look alive by pure fact, their natural balance stacked for purpose. It’s more exciting than his own long body, narrow and bland. The thing is, Jack has always contained this variety, that purpose, that plain abundant fact. Shitty doesn’t want to be too forward so his hand hovers over her thigh until he asks, “Can I touch you?”

In a story about it Jack might say, “I’ve been waiting forever for someone to ask me that.” But in real life, on this godforsaken beach, Jack grunts and practically shoves her thigh into Shitty’s hand. She doesn’t appear to shave much, Shitty notices; Lardo doesn’t either, really, so he doesn’t mind and never has. The first girls he fumbled around in high school, his early college assignations—he barely remembers those, although he also wonders when the taut rope of his life became so frayed that he was no longer able to walk his hands back over the details of it. He thinks of that metaphor, the rope metaphor, as his hands move up Jack’s thigh, closer and closer to what looks like the same scene he’s witnessed between most women’s legs.

And Shitty is not—he’s not _horrible_ , is he, for slipping his hand easily against her bare sex without asking? She doesn’t stop him, and she could if she didn’t want that that; she could wrench his whole hand away, twist his fingers to a point of crippling anguish. It’s been many years since Shitty watched Jack wail on some enforcer from behind a plane of glass—and like, Jack was never much of a fighter, but to the extent that fighting was simply part of hockey, well, Shitty _has_ seen her with men’s blood on her knuckles. She could have Shitty’s blood on her knuckles if she wasn’t okay with this.

But, she seems okay with it; wants it, even.

“This okay?” he asks, when he realizes he hasn’t.

“Can you—slow?”

“…like this?”

“Mmh.”

“What do you like?” Shitty asks.

Jack digs her heels into the sand as Shitty continues to touch her. “This is fine,” she tells him, even if the words catch a little, or even if they’re mumbled with a bit less certainty than even Jack’s typical stilted half-French mumbling. “Gently is good.”

Shitty can imagine that; all those nerves down there, he’s heard.

“See? It’s not that much—not that wet.” Jack is grinning when Shitty looks up. “I brought some, euh—” it sounds to Shitty like she says _loobrifee_ -something, “and that might help.”

“You want me to get it now?”

“Sure, yeah. I left it, like.” She points toward the bag he abandoned by her pile of clothes.

When Shitty crawls toward it, sand sticks to his fingers and the palm of his hand. “Not too wet,” Shitty says when he returns with the little bottle of KY, smearing the sand off on his legs. “Look at this.”

“What am I looking at?”

“A fucking mess,” Shitty says. He’s got a perfect view of her gaping and ready, pretty goddamn naked, and he’s hard enough that there’s sand clinging to his dick. It’s in his hair, he realizes, and not merely the hair on his head but everywhere. There’s a slight breeze that comes off the sea for a moment and then recedes—that probably doesn’t help. For just a moment, Shitty listens: the rush of the ocean onto the shore, the dock creaking as it does, Jack’s deep breathing, and trees rustling in the distance. It isn’t too cold but nor is it too warm, and the sun is setting lower, and lower, and every inch the yolk slides down the wall of the enamel sink, it takes a degree or two down with it.

Jack begins to close her legs and Shitty sighs, “Not you.” He’s getting more forceful, forgetting to think, baldly conscious of how badly he wants to plunge into this situation and how desperately he wants to fuck her brains out. He doesn’t like himself this way, but what good would hating himself for it do? “You fucking beaut,” he says, crawling over her, trying to kiss her dry lips. There’s sand in the corners, just barely—that shit really gets everywhere doesn’t it?

She puts a hand to his chest, pushes. “Shits,” she says. “Don’t.” He has to blink before she says, “Don’t kiss me.”

“What kind of rom-com shit?”

“Hm?”

“Like, it’s too personal, so you don’t want to kiss?” When Jack doesn’t say anything, Shitty clarifies, “It’s like, a trope, you know, in movies.” Quiet—just the lapping waves. “It’s too personal, like, you can fuck around, but kissing on the lips makes it real.”

“Something like that.” Jack grabs his shoulders, pushes, and Shitty follows her lead to the point where she straddles him. “Thanks for doing this for me”—it’s the last thing she says before her mouth becomes otherwise engaged.

And Shitty thinks it’s a weird thing to do at this point, thanking him—they’ve barely begun; they’re far from finished. He does get his mouth on her in good time, and again after he comes. He doesn’t spit or wipe the sand from his mouth because he doesn’t want her to think it’s something other than the sand he’s rejecting.

Besides, she’s the one who wanted to do it on the beach, the one who couldn’t have sex aboard the _Dicky_. 

* * *

They finish at night, the sun thoroughly set. It’s grown cold, and some part of Shitty wishes for the pedestrian comforts of his bed back in Cambridge, or the comfort of Jack’s skin on his—she’s warm, he knows now.

But Jack doesn’t want to cling together—she doesn’t like him, Shitty realizes, or, you know, she likes him the way she’s always liked him, as a friend, perhaps even a best friend. It’s really got nothing romantic to do with it, he sees now. She holds herself, holds her breasts—Shitty felt her nipples seize up into hard little peaks while they were going at it, and he thought she was just getting into things, gasped when he got so much as near one, her breath catching when he got one in his mouth. But now Shitty thinks, okay, she’s just getting kind of cold.

“How’re you doing?” he asks, thinking she maybe wants to talk.

“Fine,” Jack says. “That was nice.” Her fingers are in her hair, Shitty notices. When did it come undone?

“Yeah.” He’s picking the grainy sand-comingling jizz from his pubes. He flicks the cohesive bits of it toward the ocean. “I hope it stacks up to like.” Shitty pauses. “Comparison. Or like, whatever.”

“Bittle.” A beat. A breath. “Bittle was ... new. When we started. He didn’t. Well. _We_ didn’t—I mean. There was a lot that we, um. It wasn’t—it took a _long time_ to—” Shitty is listening, but, she cuts herself off. She pushes loose hair out of her face, huffing, “Well, that’s really it.”

“What’s it?”

Jack blinks. “I really ruined his life, I guess.”

“What, no, that’s crazy talk. You can’t—you gotta let Bits take responsibility for his own decisions, you know? It’s, like, _kind of_ insulting to imply that he wasn’t capable of digging himself into his own hole? Or, since it’s Bitty we’re talking about, imply he wasn’t not capable of _not_ digging himself out of his own hole—do you follow me? Does that make sense? I probably used too many double negatives, or like, definitely did.” Shitty takes a breath. “But, you know, he loves you, and he loves your life together.”

Actually, what Shitty is thinking is, well, this is Eric Bittle, he’d probably rather bake himself into a stupor and pretend it isn’t happening. He probably loves his life with Jack just slightly more than he loves not having to think about whether his life with Jack is making him happy.

But, Shitty can’t say that. So, he concludes by touching Jack’s bare upper arm with the backs of his crooked fingers, and saying, “You’re a good girl, Jack Lauren Zimmermann. I mean that in every possible way.”

Wryly: “Ha. Hm. Okay, Shits.”

“I mean, my partner’s a girl, my daughter’s a girl, my mother’s a girl, my best friend is a girl—I’ve surrounded myself with girls, here. All my important people are girls. You could call me a bit of an aficionado.”

Jack pats his hand, but otherwise, doesn’t respond to that. “I need the lavatory,” she says, pushing him off. The bathroom is right there, a short walk, back on the boat—but she puts her underwear back on before slipping away.

Shitty gropes for his cell phone—it’s in the pocket of his jeans, which are in a heap on the sand. It’s not comfortable, but he manages without having to get up at all.

He sends Lardo a single text: “I love you so fucking much.” He is not confident it’ll go through.

But it takes only a moment for her to write back, “Same, bro.”

He is the luckiest fucking man on the planet, honestly. There’s the fact that, much to his amazement, there’s service on the key—and then, after all, there’s everything else.

* * *

When Shitty does eat a sandwich—nut butter, tart cherry—all he tastes is sand.

* * *

The check-in kiosk asks Shitty if he’d like an upgrade, to business. The truth is, he mostly flies business—the firm handles it, really; his assistant puts his flight times in his schedule and Shitty prints out the boarding pass at the kiosk when he gets there. He could show a barcode on the screen of his phone, but that’s no fun; it wouldn’t remind him of flying as a kid, of accompanying his mother to give invited lectures or deliver keynotes or chair panels in Chicago, Vancouver, Cambridge—the other Cambridge. Most people coming through the terminal doors sweep right to security, unless they need to consult a sign, or have a large bag. They only put these kiosks out for the forgetful, and the nostalgic, and the petulant: old people like him, who are a bit of all of that, vocally forward-thinking and personally stuck.

He isn’t sure why he agrees to upgrade. It’s got to be partly by design, Shitty thinks; a computer screen did this to me, making the YES button larger and greener and more central. Corporations do that, he knows, he’s defended enough of them. It’s perfectly legal in America in this day and age to prey on a person’s natural weakness, to use subtle tricks and virtual brainwashing to force a man to cough up hundreds of dollars for a last-minute seat near the front of the plane, a free cup of wine he doesn’t want anyway, and less time spent in line.

The truth is, Shitty’s spent many hours of his life in the business-class cabin on airplanes, or in first class on the Acela. He carries his bag past the winding security queue and thinks, not for the first time, that when he left the nonprofit sector at age 38 because he had a child, he left some part of himself, too. He didn’t even have to think about taking that upgrade.

* * *

“It’s one carry-on per person,” the gate agent tells him.

“How much is a second carry-on?”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Jeez,” he says. “That’s pretty steep. I don’t get two? With a business-class upgrade?”

No, she says, sorry, but, “There’s no charge if you hold one of your items for the duration of the flight.”

But, therein lies the problem: he really _doesn’t_ want to fly back to Boston with a pie on his lap. “Fine.” He hands over his credit card. “All right.”

Overhead, what’s playing is a song from his first year in college: “Be my only,” it says. _Run wild. Dark doom_. It puts him right back there, to drunkenly kissing girls in the confines of some house party bedroom, the way a song from a strong memory will remind him of being in the car on the way to hockey practice with his father, or of getting high in the afternoon after classes, or of wandering half-dead on little sleep across Mass Ave and into a nice bakery to get a coffee. Song memories aren’t like specific moments, they’re echoes of time, of a place, or a mood—

She hands him back his card. He takes a seat in the lounge.

* * *

Lardo won’t pick him up from the airport—she can’t, she wouldn’t. He doesn’t ask. It’s Monday night and when his flight gets in, she’ll be making dinner, or eating it at least. Shitty drums his thighs as the plane takes an impossibly long time to descend, to land, to taxi. “Welcome to Boston’s Logan Airport,” the purser says, “where it’s 8:12 p.m., still on eastern time, no change.”

No change, Shitty thinks to himself, unbuckling.

He gets his pie from the overhead and deplanes.

* * *

Shitty lies awake in bed that night and tries not to dwell on the inconveniences of his life because he’s happy to get back to them, really: Lardo’s got the window open, for all it’s barely 30 degrees out. He’s got work in the morning. On Friday he has to go to DC for a deposition; he’s on the first train down and will have to be back before dinner. On Sunday morning he has to take B to a classmate’s birthday party at the father’s house in Framingham. On the drive there he’ll pass an exit sign for Samwell (with a brown landmark post for _Samwell University, 7 Miles_ just below it) and no matter how many times he drives past that sign without turning off, he’ll never stop instinctively thinking: Oh, fuck, that’s my turn. It puts him right back there, not to college proper but what came after: his 1L year, both too long and somehow too short, driving back on the weekends to a school he’d supposedly left behind to watch hockey and visit Lardo.

“You don’t have to come up here, you know,” he remembers her saying, and in his memory he replies with, “I know.” But that was the problem with memory: from a distance it’s like a story to him, leading statements that marched the respondent directly toward an answer. But life isn’t like that, not really—law is like that, Shitty thinks, wishing he could get up to close the window.

“Tell me about it,” Lardo says, not bothering to look up from the stack of artist’s statements she’s been annotating on her tablet. He’s been trying to sleep.

“The sex?”

“The whole trip.”

“God,” he says, turning on his side so he can gaze up at her, so that she looms so large over him, she’s all he can see. “What a vacation home. How do you relax there?” Lardo’s been; he won’t go into much detail.

“Then do you want to just tell me about the sex?”

“What do you want to know?”

She puts the tablet down. “What’d you do?”

What’s odd is that Shitty hasn’t thought about it, hasn’t played it back. “The whole roster of heteronormative man-lady things. We fucked, and um—"

“Is that the first thing you did?”

“Well, no.”

“What’s the first thing you did?” She puts a finger to her lips, like she’s curious. “Did you touch her?”

“Yeah.”

“Eat her out?”

“I—yeah.”

“Did she blow you?”

“She did, yeah.”

Lardo grabs his hand. “And did you love it?”

“ _Lards_.”

“Shits.”

“I dunno,” he says. “It’s—I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Do you not want to think about it?”

He thinks about it. “I want you to make me talk about it,” like she makes him listen after her conquests.

“Why don’t you show me?” she says. “Show me what you did with her. How’d you touch her?” She’s still holding his hand. She grips it harder—nails. “Say you’ll show me and I’ll let go.”

“First I kissed her. But she didn’t really want that.”

“What did she want?”

“I’ll show you,” Shitty promises. “Let go of my hand.”

But he didn’t really touch Jack the way Lardo wants to be touched—not really. Lardo likes it hard, direct pressure, two fingers inside of her and the pad of his thumb bringing her off all at once. “She liked this,” Shitty whispers, because he’s suddenly concerned that their kid is still next door. “Just, she liked it really slow, like this.” He’s being hesitant, coaxing, like he’s trying to convince, like he’s making an argument—he never needs to do that for Lardo.

She pulls his hair. “You’re a good guy.”

“Well.” He can feel himself blushing. His fingers are in her and it’s being called a good guy that makes him blush. “I don’t know about that, but.” He looks at her, because he can, because the bedside lamp is still on. Her eyes are narrow, like she’s curious, and not wide, like she’s horny. 

He’s hard, but he knows he’s not going to get off right now, and it looks like she isn’t, either.

“You don’t even want to talk about it. Like it’s just some service you rendered, some good you did, and now it’s behind you, and, like, I doubt many guys would just put it behind them?” She shrugs. “I kind of don’t even want to make you.”

While trying to force himself to sleep, Shitty thinks about it, and thinks about it. He’s sitting on the Red Line the next morning when he realizes, he doesn’t think a good person would put it behind him.

He texts Lardo, and then double-checks to make sure he’s drafting the message _only_ to Lardo, and not the family group text; B doesn’t need to see this: “I don’t think a good guy would fuck his best lady friend, with or without his partner’s explicit consent, almost certainly without HER partner’s explicit consent, and put it behind him like it simply didn’t matter.”

“Well, whatever,” Lardo writes back, when she gets a break around 10:30.

“Because I think not acknowledging it’s fucked up is due to me knowing it was a shitty thing to do, NPI? Bits is my friend too, and what am I doing if not enabling a situation they should be fixing together instead of sustaining? Or what if they get divorced because of me?”

“If they get divorced that’s sad and maybe they’d blame you but it’s not b/c of you.”

He wants to write back, “But how does that make me a good guy?”

Instead, Tyler knocks on the door. He wants to know which train Shitty’s going to take to DC on Friday morning and then back on Friday night. He could stay overnight instead—go down Thursday, let the firm pay for a hotel, wake up there already.

Or—or, Lardo could join him? They could bring B?

“She has school, Shits.”

It’s the softest veto.

* * *

A little reunion, of sorts.

In late April, Jack and Bitty drive back to Montreal from Palm Springs. “Why drive?” Shitty texts Jack, when she lets him know that they plan to stay overnight in Boston.

“Hate flying,” she tells him, but really—it’s perfunctory at this point. They have done this every spring the past few years, ever since they started spending the winter in Florida. Georgia and Boston are both conveniently en route. Must be nice, Shitty thinks, but then he remembers it must be a hassle, too, dragging yourselves and your big truck and all your shit from the top of the land mass to the bottom just to escape whatever it is you’re fleeing: the harsh winters or the kooky accents or your parents or your in-laws or your legacy or yourself. Shitty once applied to other law schools, and he remembers putting in applications all over, at NYU and UCLA and Chicago and Duke for fuck’s sake. In the end, he just went to fucking Harvard. They’ll have to extract him from freaking Boston with a backhoe. He’s not going anywhere alive, nor is he going anywhere dead. His kid’s gonna have to watch them break open six feet of frozen terra firma with pick axes to stuff his biodegradable, compact cube of ashes into the family plot. Some thousandth-century alien paleontologist will pry the mere impression of his bones from the bed of the long-dry Charles River.

What kind of thing happens to make a person so unpliable?

What kind of person— _what kind of person?_

The problem, as before, is that they have a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a gracious old house, no guest accommodations included. When B was much younger they could just slip her into their bed for the night or the weekend or whatever, and inflate an AeroBed in her room.

“Make em stay in a hotel,” Lardo says.

“God, Lards, we can’t.”

“You’re right, we can’t.” She rubs her eyes; her fingers are splotchy with the runaway ink of the annual faculty show. A few stray gray-stained brass plates have made it onto the kitchen counter, somehow. She likes to say that, sure, she teaches theory, but what good is theory without getting your hands dirty? “Maybe B would sleep on the couch. It’ll be like, you know, some kind of sleepover. Like, a treat, or whatever.”

“Would you like that?” Shitty asks his kid, over breakfast the next morning.

“A sleepover?” she asks. “By myself? In the _living room_?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Shitty is trying to get her into it, but he’s really psyching up himself. “You can have a flashlight, and read under the covers.”

“But I can read on my computer.” She’s breaking the crusty edges off of her Pop-Tart; she likes the icing and the goo in the middle, and never mind the cracker. He hates that he loves that she’s not going to be easy about this. “It seems not fair.”

“Nope,” he agrees. “It’s not fair, but what are you gonna do? Sometimes friends come to town, you know, and you have to accommodate them.” She doesn’t seem to buy it, just looks at him funny. He sighs. “I’ll give you twenty bucks?”

“Twenty bucks!” (He also loves that it still sounds like a lot of money to her.) “You’re bribing me!”

“Yeah. Just don’t tell your mom.” He gets out his wallet.

* * *

It would be nice if things were just easy with Jack and Bitty, wouldn’t it? Shitty thinks of the other couples he and Lardo socialize with: a scattering of less-than-horrible other Milton parents; some gals Lardo knows from her department, her old department, her MFA, or the _scene_ ; Shitty’s coworkers, sometimes; his clients, when it’s necessary. How often do you really care to hire a babysitter and plan your weekend nights around the T, sit in the flickering candlelight of the new place that restaurant group just flipped from pan-African to nouvelle-casual, chit-chat about various Milton teachers and who got which grant and how you knew that fuckass back when you were clerking for the First Circuit and, god, if you never cross paths again it’ll be too soon? But there’s a kind of simplicity to all that, too, a kind of rote social obligation that’s over once you sign the bill, unless someone’s still finishing their wine. (Artists have a tendency to linger, Shitty’s noticed, all but licking the glass clean.) You get up, you go, maybe you do it again in six months—then your kid graduates, or someone gets a job three time zones over or they decide to go back to the judicial, and there you are again, not much richer for having known them.

Shitty wonders if he was supposed to forget about his college friends at some point along the way. He never had a wedding, but maybe Jack and Bitty should have lost interest in joint vacations after _their_ wedding, or maybe Shitty shouldn’t have knocked Lardo up so Bitty wouldn’t have been the first non-blood-relative to hold their daughter. Maybe the problem is the zero siblings between the four of them.

Anyway, Shitty knows that he has to do the following: move the car so they can park their monstrous truck behind the house. Ask the cleaning service to put new linens on B’s bed. Pick up that unsalted, cultured butter in the gold wrapper, or maybe it’s the silver wrapper.

“I brought fresh citrus,” Bitty announces, lugging a crate of it in from the car upon arrival. “Y’all take the pretty ones. The rest, that’s for pie.”

“How many do you need, Bits?” Lardo’s weighing them in her perfect hands, big pale ones—grapefruits, maybe.

“Mmm, I’m thinking two pomelos for a meringue,” he says, “and then grapefruit Shaker pie. That’s a fancy one, little B, you cure the grapefruit with sugar. That’s called macerating—you break it down.” He pinches her cheek. “You want a Valencia, sweetheart? These ones came off my tree.”

She takes it, looking up at Shitty with eyes like, what? “It’s just an orange,” she mumbles, rolling it in her hands.

“Sweet orange,” Jack says. “Thin-skinned.”

B asks Jack, “Do you really grow it on your tree?”

Jack nods. “They’re nice for juice,” she says, from a perch at the end of the kitchen counter.

“Where’s the sugar?” Bitty asks.

Lardo tells him, “It’s here, Bits, over the fridge—”

“Y’all keep your sugar over the fridge?”

“Ever had fresh orange juice?” Jack bids toward B with a crooked finger. “I bet I could juice one for you, if you’re thirsty.”

“I don’t think we have a juicer,” Shitty says.

“It just takes a little strength is all.” Jack clenches her fist. “I used to do it for Bits. Also, a fork helps.”

B puts the orange back down on the counter. “I’m not thirsty,” she says.

“He juice the oranges himself now?”

“B. Shitty Knight!” Bitty shouts across the kitchen. “Do not think I didn’t hear that! I could juice you an orange with my bare hands and you wouldn’t know what to do about it!” He grasps a pomelo like he’s planning to throw it, though he doesn’t.  “Y’all have a microplane?”

Lardo asks, “A what?”

Shitty takes a look at Bitty from across the kitchen. Admittedly, it’s not too large a kitchen; they’re hardly yelling. Bitty’s got this look on his face like—like he knows. Shitty wonders, does he know? It’s something he hasn’t seen from Bitty before: accusatory, a little helpless. Desperate, maybe. Shitty doesn’t want to like it.

A beat too late, Jack chimes in: “We bought a juicer. I’ve lost a lot of upper body strength. And my fingers have shrunk.”

“Really?” B asks—huge eyes, mooning.

“Yeah. Really. None of my rings fit anymore.”

“Not that old yarn, really? You can get em resized, you know.”

“What time do people get here?” B loosely grabs the hem of Lardo’s button-down.

“Not until this afternoon. Late afternoon.” Lardo rests an arm on B’s shoulder. “So, like, would a regular grater work?”

“Oh, I think I can make do—”

Shitty interrupts to say, “Excuse me, which people?”

“The crew, Shits.” Lardo makes an encompassing gesture. “Our friends.”

“We have friends?” Shitty jokes, mostly because he completely missed this.

“I’m not making two pies for my own gratification here!”

Lardo pulls their cheese grater out of a drawer. “But aren’t you?”

As if answering another question entirely, Bitty says, “Well, it’s not like anyone ever asks me what _I_ like to eat.”

“What do you want to eat, Bits?”

Bitty’s not looking at Jack when he says, “Oh, you know me, hon, I’m just happy with anything.” Is he zesting more aggressively? No, that’s got to be—no, or maybe yes, but if yes it must be trying to get it done with a grater.

Either way, that comment, apparently, pisses Jack off: her whole posture shifts, and she gets up, arms crossed. “I’m taking a walk.”

“You need company?” Shitty asks.

Jack just nods, already heading for the door.

“Pick up some beer if you walk by a place.”

Bitty says, “Be good, y’all, we’ll just hold down the fort here.”

It’s spring outside but not in a warm way. Jack and Bitty’s truck is littered already with the buds or spores or whatever of a big tree in the neighbors’ yard. In all the years they’re lived in this house, they’ve never found out what it was. Lardo spoke once about gathering up every bud one season and shellacking them together on whatever size canvas was large enough to bear them all, and then burying the whole thing in the backyard. But the yard is a limited common element and Jethro downstairs wouldn’t approve any significant digging because he didn’t want his dog running around in dirt. He meticulously maintains the bulbs, the wintergreens, and the groundcover—Shitty really wants to like the guy, but who has the time? He’s barely got the capacity to follow up with the people he’s _already_ supposed to care about, but when they’re not getting into his bed most nights of the week, it’s not so easy. His mother’s just in Brookline and that’s in itself a challenge. He didn’t even know people were coming over, for fuck’s sake.

* * *

Jack grabs something from the truck, a fleece, or maybe you’d call it a hoodie, and Shitty sees more crates of citrus. Jack apparently catches him staring: “Some’s for us, some for my parents, some for the neighbors.” She sighs and slams the door.

They’re about halfway down the block when she says, “Three days in a car with someone is a lot.”

“What if it’s someone you’re crazy about?”

“Well.” She takes her phone out of her pocket, opens the camera, starts to fiddle with the settings. “I’m always crazy. Doesn’t mean—sometimes I like to hear myself think, I guess.”

“What do you think about?” Jack shrugs, and Shitty knows that means she doesn’t really want to talk about it. “Well,” he tries, “you doing okay?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think about...?”

“Don’t think about what?” Her flip-flops make a noise when they come up from the ancient bricks that pass for sidewalk in Shitty’s neighborhood—maybe they should be walking in the road?

“You know. What we—”

“Ah.” Jack bites her lip. “You know. I haven’t even thought about it.”

Shitty winces, because he himself said the same thing. For some reason, he believes her.

Jack tries to walk toward the campus and Shitty redirects: he doesn’t know why he bought a place in Cambridge, nor is it something that he planned. It was just that they wanted to have a baby, started thinking about two bedrooms, and found something affordable that didn’t scream “yuppie” and wasn’t on a main road. But Shitty also thinks, from time to time, when he’s on a walk and someone starts to veer toward the teeming locus of his middle-twenties, that he can’t remember much about law school, that it was three brutal years he fairly hated, and that what he does recall from those years (twenty-two to twenty-five, give or take) is a lot of sitting with Lardo and distantly observing the start of Jack’s hockey career, two passive states.

There’s a liquor store (a “packie,” Jack calls it, just to chirp him, though Shitty’s never used that term in his life) and Jack pays, because “it’s nice of you to put us up” and Shitty says “it’s nothing, you’re family,” but Jack knows it’s not nothing and buys two cases to carry back to Shitty’s, one under each arm, because she’ll always be a gentleman.

“Jesus,” Shitty says, “at least let me take one,” and Jack does without much argument because, well, a gentleman also knows her limits

Little B is sitting on the steps when they return, and she is eating slices of pomelo. “Uncle Bitty cut this for me,” she says, as if they might be bothered. “He said there was plenty and I could have it.”

“Of course,” Jack says, and she puts her case of beer down. “There is plenty. A whole truck full.”

“You like it?” Shitty asks.

She does a curious thing: she thinks about it. “I don’t know.” She’s still chewing, peeling the jeweled flesh from the tennis ball rind. “I like that the inside is different from the outside. Oranges aren’t like that. It’s a nice little surprise. But it’s too thick. I don’t like it.” She shows them a slice with its imbalanced cross-section of fruit-to-rind ratio. “See? It’s like, twice as much skin.”

To Shitty’s great surprise, Jack sits next to B on the steps to his house, puts an arm around her, and says, “The flesh of living things is very vulnerable. Over time nature grows a thicker skin so the environment won’t damage the interior.”

“Well, yeah,” B says, offering Jack a piece of pomelo.

“I’m okay.” Jack takes a breath. She’s not really looking at B, is more looking at Shitty. “People’s skin is, mm, not that tough? You develop coping mechanisms and you protect yourself in other ways. You maybe do things so the inside can survive even if on the outside they’re not so great.”

“Uh huh.”

“Or maybe the inside’s not so great so you protect yourself against people finding that out.”

“That’s very heavy-handed,” Shitty says, “for a metaphor.”

“Yep, ha ha, well, I don’t do much subtlety.” She pats B on the head and hops up. “Let’s get back in the house before Bits loses it.”

“Loses it how?”

“You know, wondering where we are.” Jack extends a hand.

B keeps hers firmly in lap. She looks around, like she’s not sure who to address it to: “He wants me to be in a video.”

Shitty catches one of Jack’s brows quirk. The look at each other, a kind of, _yes, typical_ , and he looks down at his daughter, who’s looking up at them like, _help?_

“Uh, well, that could be fun.” He’s trying to be positive because Bits is his friend, right, and doesn’t he owe the guy that much? “I’ve been in videos. Going way back. You just kind of like, talk to Bitty, help him bake. What’s he want you to bake?”

“One of those pies,” she says. “He said I should learn but like, I don’t know?”

Jack sits back down. She puts her hands in her lap, too. “Do you want to be in a video?”

“Not really.”

“So say no,” Shitty tells her. Then he remembers he’s her father, and so he adds, “But say like, thanks for asking, I appreciate it, I know your videos mean a lot to you.”

B’s little eyebrows shoot up. “But that would make him angry!”

At this point, Jack grabs B by the hands, right out of her lap, and says, “So what?”

“So, well—”

Jack doesn’t let her finish: “You can’t worry if what you do will make someone angry. Something you do will always make _someone_ angry. Bittle knows that. Just say you don’t want to.”

Shitty is swept up, suddenly, by a gust of fatherly affirmation: “You can say no to adults, B.”

“Can I say no to you?”

Jack looks at him like, well, how’re you gonna get yourself out of this one, Shits?

“The older you get, yeah, the more you’ll have to say no to me.”

“Can I say no to Mom?”

“Absolutely fucking never.”

“But I can say no to Uncle Bitty?”

“So long as like, he isn’t watching you, and he isn’t asking something reasonable, like, please don’t go up to an open bar at a wedding and order a vodka tonic.” Shitty pauses. “Or please finish your homework before you go online.”

“Or please don’t go out into the cold without a jacket,” Jack adds.

“Or you can’t light candles without my supervision.”

“Or don’t smoke cigarettes—”

“Okay! I get it, you guys.”

There’s so much Shitty wants to say: you have to learn how to say “no” to protect yourself, because your parents love you but they aren’t _you_ , and increasingly you’ll become capable of taking care of yourself and your parents, for all their best intentions, won’t necessary know what’s good, and you’ll have to decide for yourself, because there are so many people out there who will want to take advantage of you, just by virtue of being human, and you’ll get to a point where telling right from wrong becomes so confusing you’ll wish for simpler times when your parents just said “yes” or “no” and you at least, stifled and frustrated, were able to get on with your day—with your life—nevertheless.

But what the fuck does Shitty know? All of that would be a mouthful, and he thinks—he knows she’ll figure it out.

Also, he’s pretty sure that next time visitors come through town, she won’t want to give up her bedroom so easily.

Jack asks, “How’s school?”

B blushes and takes Jack’s hand. She takes her plate of frayed pomelo pith and lets Jack hoist her up. “Oh, it’s just boring.”

“What’s boring?” Jack picks up the case of beer.

“After you!” B gets the door for her. “Oh, we’re doing linocuts in art class, but I used to do those with my mom. The rest of the class is pretty slow and we had to do a lesson on cutting away from you and other safety things, things I already know.”

“You have any you want to show me?”

Shitty hears her say, “Yes, in my backpack, but I also took pictures of the ones I left drying in the studio yesterday.”

“Well, show me that, and I’ll show you the pictures I took on Boca Chita with your dad.”

Then the screen door snaps to a close behind them at they go upstairs.

Feeling more extraneous than ever, Shitty shifts his hold on the case of beer he’s been holding. Wipes his feet on the welcome mat. Heads inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Despite my better attempts to find new places to do fandom I am still mostly around Tumblr [@camilliar](http://camilliar.tumblr.com/) , but I also accept e-mails via sekritomg@gmail; I like concrit and discussing WTF with this comic??


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